A Cold Death in Amsterdam (Lotte Meerman Book 1)

by Jager, Anja de

  ‘I had medication – that helped,’ he said.

  Maybe I should use the little blue pills in that pot on my bedside table. The thought of losing my work safety net was so frightening I had to push it out of my mind. My father coughed again.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Just a tickly throat.’ He took one glove off, got a sweet out of his pocket and peeled off the wrapper. He held another one out to me. I shook my head. ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘it was hard. There was nothing. A black hole.’

  ‘You should have told me . . . you should have said. Did Mum know?’

  He nodded. He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he went on, ‘But the work is hard as well. It’s no picnic. You know that yourself, don’t you, Lotte?’

  ‘Yes.’ I wasn’t sure my response was audible.

  ‘If you ever want to talk, I’m here,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen most things – nothing would surprise or shock me.’

  He would be surprised if I told him the truth about sleeping with a murderer. Not just sleeping with him, but being in love with him. I’d been so infatuated with Paul, and for the first time in a long while I had been hopeful that I could start a new family, could replace my ex-husband with someone who’d love me more, with this man who’d gone through the same things as I had: the loss of a child and the subsequent break-up of his marriage.

  I couldn’t risk talking to my father about this. I needed to change the subject. The question that had been on my mind ever since the Photofit, ever since my father had told Hans and Stefanie about the two people who picked up the files, reasserted itself and came out into the open. ‘What you said back in the office – was any of that true?’

  His face pulled into deep wrinkles. ‘Of course it was. All of it. Why?’

  I bit my lip. I didn’t want to tell him what my mother had revealed to me. When he’d said that nothing would surprise him, that he’d seen most things, was that what he meant? That he’d taken cash, therefore he wouldn’t be shocked by anything I could have done?

  The tram took a sweeping left corner past the university building and passed the Grand Café Luxembourg, where Stefanie had first met her husband Patrick. The bell rang to warn a group of students who were crossing without looking. They dashed like cats back onto the pavement, laughing but indignant.

  ‘Why are you asking, Lotte?’ he repeated. ‘I was careless not to check their IDs, but my mind was on something else.’

  I wanted to ask about the money that my mother had told me about, that Stefanie was so fixated with, but decided not to. ‘Just checking how much . . . how much you exactly remembered and how much you were filling in the gaps.’

  ‘Oh, I clearly remember it all. Don’t you have some of those moments – deciding moments in a case, or in your life – that are so burned in your memory, you won’t ever forget them? This is one of those for me.’

  I nodded. For me that was the first time I’d met Paul. I didn’t want to remember, but it was as my father said: the moment was burned in my memory. The first thing I had noticed about Paul was his age. I could see the damage that the years and the pressure had done to him. When I’d made the appointment over the phone, I’d heard the voice I’d recognised from the tapes. But voices didn’t change much. I’d watched him so often on television or seen his photo in the newspapers that I’d felt I knew him. I’d forgotten he was now fifteen years older than in those initial TV interviews where he and his wife asked the public for help to find their daughter. When I’d met him, his dark hair had faded to grey, his green-grey eyes had spoken of years of hurt. He hadn’t needed to tell me he’d suffered from the disappearance of his daughter; I thought I read it in the lines of his face, that it was all there, clear for everybody to see.

  ‘Do you mind if I record our conversation?’ I had asked. This all had to be done by some semblance of rules.

  ‘Of course not. Whatever it takes to find her,’ he’d said. ‘Whatever it takes.’

  How did that memory make me feel now? Dirty? Stupid? Gullible? Did my father’s memory of his last case make him feel awful too?

  ‘How do you feel about the Petersen case?’ I asked.

  ‘It was my last case and I never closed it. It’s unfinished business. However, I had never given it much thought until you turned up, Lotte. I’d wondered why it was never resolved, but I assumed that Wouter Vos’s witness statement had probably turned out to be a dead end. Now I feel guilty because it seems that I should have checked who I was giving those files to. It seems it was my mistake.’

  I thought I could understand why he was doing what he was doing: he was trying to steer us in a certain direction. Maybe he wanted to make up for what he’d done twelve years ago. I was tempted to follow my father’s lead and see where it took us.

  The tram took a last, final sweep and my father and I arrived at Centraal Station. In the mass of people swarming outside like ants from a disturbed nest, we said a quick goodbye. He hugged me. I didn’t hug him back, but nor did I resist it. I just stood still and let him hold me. He walked off towards platform 13 and I remained in the forecourt of the station, like a rock in the middle of a river, people streaming past me on both sides. From the right I heard a street organ playing ‘Tulips from Amsterdam’ and from the left the sound of panpipes. He didn’t turn round. At least this time I didn’t cry.

  I walked home to get some fresh cold air, past the building site for the new metro line that covered Centraal Station’s front, along the tourist restaurants of the Damrak and the shops of the Nieuwmarkt. A cloud of angry sound drifted from a group of Moroccan youths who walked past a shop that sold fashionable jeans and T-shirts. Their voices intermingled with the swearwords of the rap music pumping from the shop. The noise made me look at them as I walked past, a reflex born out of patrolling these streets on the lookout for trouble for over a decade now, but the vowels and consonants of their foreign language missed the aggressive edge that pointed to oncoming violence. They were just teenagers asserting themselves in a group.

  In the summer, groups of youths would congregate outside the shops but now it was so cold that nobody was standing still. Everybody kept on the move, walking up and down the street, throwing quick glances into the shop windows but nobody paused to admire anything. A wine merchant was offering a free woollen hat – a white affair with orange pompoms – to anyone spending 25 euros or more, and the souvenir stalls were doing a brisk trade in ear-muffs to those tourists who hadn’t counted on the frost. Every now and then, an elderly couple ambled past but the average age of the people on the Nieuwmarkt was under twenty. The shops knew their target audience: loud music created a sound barrier outside every shop, making sure that older people, such as myself, didn’t drift in by accident and waste the time of shop assistants busy talking to each other. Only the young, with permanent ear damage caused by listening to their iPods too loudly, felt comfortable trying on clothes in changing rooms where you had to shout to be heard.

  I was relieved when the Kalverstraat ended. I turned right past the floating flower market, left the stink of fries and McDonald’s behind me and swapped it for the scentless rows of hothouse tulips and crates of bulbs. Two more turns, ten more minutes of walking along slush- and snow-covered pavements, and I was at my canal. I could see the carriage-clock shape of the gabled roof of my house. I knew I was lucky to live here. I was lucky to have a job I was good at. I even felt lucky to have met my father again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘He’s home,’ Stefanie said. ‘Van Ravensberger – he’s at home today.’

  I didn’t look up from my PC screen. I was surprised it had taken her this long. Ever since his nephew had told us what he’d overheard and Stefanie had said she wanted to get the uncle on something, I had expected this meeting. Stefanie had stayed away from our office since she’d walked out in a huff yesterday and I hadn’t minded at all. Feeling that I had to protect my father against her, without being seen to do so, was tiring. This was her first v
isit since then.

  ‘I spoke to his secretary,’ she said. ‘He can see us at ten.’

  The clock at the bottom right of my computer screen said 08:47. ‘Where does he work?’

  ‘We’re meeting him at his home. Blaricum.’

  ‘That’s less than an hour’s drive. I’ll pop round to your office in fifteen minutes then.’

  I knew how long it would take to get to Blaricum because I’d been there a few times. My ex-husband had wanted to buy a house in that small town after he’d made his first million. It was where a number of his golf buddies had a house and he’d thought it was more in keeping with our new financial status because it was where the rich lived: in lovely countryside but still within easy commuting distance from Amsterdam. It was where the women played tennis and the men played away. But the price of houses there was well out of our reach, and owning a small flat in an expensive part of the country was not what he’d had in mind. So we’d stayed where we were, in our house in Zaandam, north of Amsterdam, the house we’d moved into just before we got married. I hadn’t minded. I didn’t think Blaricum was the kind of place where I’d fit in.

  Instead of leaving, Stefanie walked over to the whiteboard, bumping against my chair as she passed.

  ‘Who’s that?’ She pointed at the Photofit of the woman who’d borrowed her name when she’d collected the crates from my father.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Looks familiar.’

  ‘What about the guy?’

  ‘Not sure. Maybe.’ She peered closer.

  ‘Those were the two people who went to Alkmaar.’

  ‘Ah, OK.’ Stefanie stepped away from the wall. ‘Is it some actress? Sportswoman?’

  ‘If you’ve met her . . .’ Hans said.

  ‘He made the whole thing up,’ Stefanie interrupted him.

  ‘But the woman who used your name looks familiar to you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not interested in this guessing game. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.’ She drifted her fingers over my desk as she walked past. They rested for a second on the stack of files from CI Moerdijk that were still on my desk from yesterday. ‘Was he . . . any good?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Moerdijk’s work. Up to the standard you’d expect?’

  I took some time to respond, trying to figure out why she wanted to know. The boss was difficult to judge. On the one hand, he hadn’t understood the financial intricacies of the Petersen fraud and had assigned a motive to Goosens that hadn’t been there. I didn’t blame him for not understanding, but surely he could have had help from the Financial Fraud department, similar to the assistance that Stefanie was giving me. But on the other hand, he had completely backed me over the Wendy Leeuwenhoek case, given me a large part in the inquiry in my first case in his group, after my move from André Kamp’s squad. What came to mind were the pencil scribblings in the margins and the clean-up of my files. ‘Very diligent,’ I said.

  She laughed with her mouth only. ‘Diligent. Yes, he’s definitely that. Very thorough.’ She put a hand on my shoulder. I swivelled my chair until it fell off. She laughed again. ‘See you in fifteen.’ The swell of her hips made them bounce even more than they normally did. The flesh bulged out at either end of the line of underwear like a pillow tightly bound in the middle with a single piece of string.

  When we could no longer hear her footsteps, Hans opened his mouth but I raised my hand to stop him. ‘Don’t say it; I don’t want to hear it. You were going to say something about her joining our team. I dread to think of it: she already hangs around here enough.’ I opened the report again and looked at the spidery writing.

  ‘She recognised that woman, was all I was going to say.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’ But the woman looked completely unfamiliar to me.

  ‘They must have met,’ Hans said. ‘The person who used her name must have known that Stefanie Dekkers worked for the police. Or she’d been told to use that name by somebody who did.’ He got up and gave his whole body a long stretch. ‘And of course Freek Veenstra too.’ He walked up to the whiteboard and drew a beautifully straight arrow between the Photofits and Anton Lantinga. ‘They both worked the Petersen Capital case.’ He turned back to me with an enormous grin. ‘Freek Veenstra and Stefanie Dekkers. It was one of her first cases, did you know that?’

  ‘Fits very nicely,’ I said. I didn’t tell Hans the truth: that my father had got rid of those files and that nobody had come to collect them. ‘She confiscated Anton Lantinga’s PC. She told me he was absolutely livid. Her best day at work ever, she said.’

  ‘He’d have remembered her name.’

  Hans’s smirk seemed to follow me as I walked down the corridor to where the Financial Fraud team sat. Stefanie would have interpreted the use of her name completely differently: she would no doubt say that my father had picked the name from the police directory and had chosen two people from the Financial Fraud department exactly to sow this plausible seed. She would say that it had backfired on him, now that she was working on this case herself. She would say that, now, his lie had finally been found out. Seeing as I knew that he’d been taking bribes, she was most likely right.

  Van Ravensberger’s house in the green heart of Blaricum was as I’d imagined it: imposing. Stefanie rang the doorbell. I hadn’t expected the man himself to open the door, but here he was: Ferdinand van Ravensberger – the man whose nephew Ben started it all by trying to shoot me in the petrol station. He wasn’t as tall as I thought he’d be, but was the same height as me, wiry and trim and with a haircut that spoke of money; you imagined some girl spending hours cutting it hair by hair. Of the three men who went to university together – Van Ravensberger, Lantinga and Goosens – Ferdinand van Ravensberger looked by far the youngest. He was attractive and I found it hard to imagine the man I saw in front of me as the bad-tempered tyrant his nephew had described.

  ‘Inspector Stefanie Dekkers, Financial Fraud department.’ She smiled widely as she said it. Maybe this was what she dreamed of at night, picturing in her mind the moment she could finally arrest Van Ravensberger. Or just anybody famous. She showed her badge.

  I showed mine. ‘Detective Lotte Meerman, CID.’

  ‘CID?’ The muscles around his jaw tensed up. His eyes narrowed and he squinted at the badge. He looked from me to my badge and back.

  I nodded.

  ‘I see. You’d better come in. Does this have anything to do with Ben?’ He stepped back into the hallway and opened a door to the right. ‘We’ll go in here: the office away from the office.’ As he let us pass I got the smell of soap but no aftershave. He closed the front door behind us.

  His home office was made up of two rooms. The smallest seemed to be a meeting room with a glass and stainless-steel table and eight chairs. It was connected to the second room by a glass door. This second room was about six times the size of our office, which seated four. At one end was Ferdinand’s desk with three computer monitors; at the other his plasma TV was tuned to CNN and the screen showed a woman talking about the situation in Afghanistan. Opposite the door to the meeting room were French windows that in summer must extend his office into the garden.

  ‘CID and Financial Fraud.’ He silenced the woman on TV with a remote control and sat down. ‘That must mean this isn’t about Ben, right? Financial Fraud wouldn’t be here for him.’ He said it to himself more than to us and neither Stefanie nor I reacted. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take a seat.’ His voice was deep, not gruff or rumbling, but clear and full of sound like a large church bell. If he ever wanted to change careers, he’d make a perfect newsreader: when he talked, you’d automatically listen.

  I sat in one of the Le Corbusier chairs opposite his desk, a surprisingly comfortable contraption of steel and black leather. The chair had that typical male smell: leather mixed with cigars. Stefanie sat down beside me, but I didn’t look at her. I kept focused on his face as I said, ‘We’re investigating a murder.’

  He crossed his arms and sat for
ward. ‘Is this where you are going to ask me where I was on this-and-this day in 1973?’

  ‘Not quite that long ago,’ Stefanie said coolly. ‘We’re re-investigating the murder of Otto Petersen and we’re pretty sure it’s linked to the Petersen Capital fraud.’

  He nodded. ‘Petersen – of course. How long ago was that?’ He seemed to relax, scratched the back of his head and smiled a rueful smile. ‘I lost a lot of money in that fund.’

  ‘It was twelve years ago that he was shot, nineteen years since the fraud. We’re currently talking to investors to find out how the fund worked. What can you tell us about Otto Petersen, Geert-Jan Goosens and Anton Lantinga?’ Stefanie asked.

  ‘I didn’t know Petersen well. I mainly dealt with Geert-Jan.’

  I didn’t interrupt him even though I knew from the photo that Otto Petersen’s mother had given me that he was lying. I wanted to hear where he was going with this, give him just enough rope to hang himself with.

  ‘Did you talk to him after the fraud?’

  ‘The next day, after it became public, he called to apologise.’

  The shrill sound of my mobile suddenly interrupted Ferdinand with its old-fashioned ring. I had tried a number of ringtones, but experience had taught me that if my mobile didn’t sound like a normal telephone, I didn’t pick it up. Stefanie turned to me, looking annoyed. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and opened my handbag. The first thing my hand connected with as I rummaged for my mobile was the frame of the photo Mrs Petersen had given me. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t got round to putting it on the whiteboard. I’d gone to Alkmaar especially to get this photo and then had forgotten all about it. Come to think of it, I hadn’t even told Stefanie I had it. I had been going to when my father turned up yesterday afternoon. Another mistake caused by my father. The curly edge of the ornate silver frame felt like cold waves under my fingers. My mobile kept ringing and I opened the bag further.

  ‘Do you remember how he sounded?’ Stefanie continued the interview.